


The John Sheppard Book Club

by krabapple



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:38:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krabapple/pseuds/krabapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In this universe, John Sheppard can read a lot faster than he usually lets on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The John Sheppard Book Club

John is 24 pages away from the end when McKay plops down into the seat across from him and swipes his last piece of bacon. John doesn't even look up, though he wonders once again if Rodney has _any idea_ about how loudly he chews.

"What is that?" McKay asks, and John can hear the gulp of coffee that follows. "Training manual? 1001 Ways to Kill a Man?" McKay snaps his fingers as if he's had a brilliant idea. "I know! It's cleverly disguised porn, isn't it?"

John merely grunts and turns the page.

"Fine." McKay huffs and leans over the table in order to read the title on the spine. " _War and Peace_!" He exclaims this so loudly that this time John has no choice but to look up and smile begrudgingly at the faces now turned their way. "You . . . you," Rodney sputters.

John turns his gaze on him. "I do know how to read, Rodney," he says slowly, as if explaining something to a small child.

"Well, of course you can read, I wouldn't expect the military's standards to have decreased that much even though, well, maybe they have in recent years, but you were surely recruited before that." Rodney stops to take a breath. " _Tolstoy_?" he adds.

"I happen to think Tolstoy had a deep sense of people living as one body, one brotherhood, in the overall bleakness that is human condition," John says easily, going back to his book.

Rodney makes some sort of strangled sound and John has to hide a grin. From the way Rodney huffs when he gets up from the table, John must have not have done as good a job hiding his smile as he thought. The thought makes him smile even wider.

*

Three days later a copy of _Anna Karenina_ shows up on his desk, and John's pretty sure he knows where it came from.

*

"Well, obviously the sex was pretty hot," John drawls, meeting Teyla's strike with a sideswipe of his own. He catches Teyla's smile.

Rodney's sitting on the low bench near the windows, watching them spar. He's been bugging John for the last four days about his progress on _Anna Karenina_ , bemoaning John's slowness, the American public school system for producing products with such poor reading speed and comprehension, and Levin's fondness for Kitty pretty much all at the same time.

McKay rolls his eyes. "Well, yes, clearly Vronsky had some prowess in the bedroom." Teyla's eyebrows go up but she doesn't comment.

"I'd say," John agrees.

"But the real question is whether or not her adultery is morally reprehensible or actually the opposite, an awakening of her mind and soul as well as her body."

"Sexual awakening often symbolizes a woman's inner growth," Teyla offers, meeting John's downward blow.

Rodney blinks. "Well. Nonetheless," he starts.

"Adultery is a sin," John says.

This has exactly the effect John had intended -- he'd be surprised if they hadn't felt Rodney's eyeroll five levels down.

"I should have known. You're one of those apple pie eating, corn fed, milk drinking, church going, fellowship dinner eating Bible thumpers, aren't you? This is just great, how your entire moral compass has been trained by some backwards preachers and some two thousand year old, cobbled together scrolls."

"We're Methodists. It's called Wednesday night supper," John says calmly. "And adultery in the Bible wasn't really a moral sin, it was about property and protecting the patrolinial line of the tribe, so therefore only really applied to women. Which is at least part of where and why _Tolstoy got the idea_ ," he finishes.

"Oh," Rodney says. He pauses while the crack of the practice batons lingers in the air. "So would you say, then, using that framework, that Tolstoy was punishing Anna by running her under the train?"

John steps away from Teyla, signaling to her he's momentarily resting from their sparring, and turns wide eyes on Rodney.

Rodney starts to stammer immediately. "Oh. Oh. Oh my God. Shit. I thought you'd _finished_ \-- you were speaking so confidently about latter parts of the novel, and --" he trails off as John's grin starts to tug at the corner of his mouth. "You son of a bitch," Rodney manages, and John's grin fully erupts.

Teyla uses that moment to grab her towel and make her retreat before Rodney's head explodes.

*

Three days later John is _trying_ to do his late night patrol of the south pier perimeter, but Rodney is still nattering on about the industrial revolution, symbolism and trains. Sheppard's only half-listening, but somewhere around area B-19 Rodney's ranting starts with more about industrialization and then moves on to something that sounds suspiciously like, "men waving their guns around." John, who is waving his own gun around at that very moment, stops.

"What?" he asks.

"Well, I'm just saying, sometimes you can't trust men and their guns, it's like they're an extension of their --"

A sudden thought occurs to John, and he holds up a hand, stalling the rest of Rodney's litany. "Have you been reading Virginia Woolf lately?"

Rodney ducks his head.

"For God's sake, McKay."

"Just a little _To the Lighthouse_ ," Rodney protests.

"No. I know _Mrs. Dalloway_ talk when I hear it."

"Shut up, Sheppard."

"Geez. Man up McKay. Go read some Dostovesky and get back to me."

"You can't order me around," Rodney protests. John quirks an eyebrow.

Rodney turns on his heel while muttering something that sounds like, "I hate you."

*

It goes like that for a while. The Wraith have been quiet (or relatively so), and they've attended more harvest festivals than trials at the planets they've been exploring. So they have more time to read than ever, which slightly exasperates Rodney, whose exasperation more than slightly amuses John. They read _The Brothers Karamozov_ and _Crime and Punishment_. When they start to find the Russians too depressing, _Because it's dark eight months out of the year there_ , John explains, they start in on the French, which both of them abandon quickly. Rodney thinks Stendhal is a pretentious idiot and John thinks Zola is even more depressing than the Russians, and without any of the grace.

John tries to initiate Rodney into some classic American fare. He gives McKay Poe and Rodney gives him _The Scarlet Letter_ even though neither of them can comprehend why on earth that stupid A is a big deal, and Rodney objects to what he repeatedly calls "The Anvil with an A." McKay reads some Hemingway during "Sheppard's machismo phase," and promptly retaliates with some Gertrude Stein, which of course John can't stand. They spend half the night on PX6-549 arguing over which is the Great American Novel, _Huck Finn_ (John) or _The Great Gatsby_ (Rodney), until Ronon threatens to shoot them both and they subside, still grumbling.

After that they move on to England, and John nearly gives himself a migraine (twice) trying to read _Beowulf_ in Old English. When Rodney admits he cheated with a modern translation, John inflicts Chaucer, which of course backfires since Rodney ends up loving it. John ups the stakes and gives Rodney _Paradise Lost_ for his birthday only to find Dante's _Inferno_ on the pilot's seat of one of the puddlejumpers a few days later.

When they need a bit of a break, they move on to _Harry Potter_ , which Rodney protests loudly on account of it being, in his words, "commercially peddled soft-core science wrapped up in a big bow of bad prose." He also won't say the word _magic_ without using his fingers to make quotation marks in the air, at least until John can't take it anymore and slaps him on the back of the head one day at breakfast, sending his coffee flying. After that Rodney settles down a bit, though he can't stand Hermione for at least the first three books, which John thinks is a very particular case of the pot calling the kettle black, though he keeps that nugget to himself. On one memorable night John opens the doors of his quarters to find Rodney on the other side, clutching _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ to his chest, literally speechless, his mouth opening and closing with soft little pops.

"A _curtain_?" Rodney finally manages.

"Yeah, buddy," John says, and steers Rodney into his room by the elbow.

By mutual consent they start to read Dickens, though not without some conflict. John gets a spoonful of mashed potatoes to the eye for daring to critique Pip in _Great Expectations_ , but he raids Rodney's supposedly secret stash of chocolate in his desk drawer in the lab and makes off with it when Rodney calls Esther from _Bleak House_ whiny. They run through _A Christmas Carol_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_ , too, with Rodney cracking "paid by the word, indeed" every half an hour. But John notices that when they talk about Dickens, disagreements aside, Rodney is remarkably quiet -- for Rodney -- which spooks him a little. John wakes up at four a.m. while they are in the middle of _David Copperfield_ , an ache so heavy in his chest that he feels the need to rub the area over his heart with the heel of his hand, thinking that perhaps all of the abandoned, lost boys of Jo Rowling's and Dickens' worlds are just a little too familiar.

*

It's lunch in the mess, and they are plotting their next move. Fantasy is on the table, since John has never read _The Lord of the Rings_ , which is giving Rodney a most predictable and spectacular fit. He's muttering something about both hobbits and Philistines into his vegetable soup when John floats the idea of Jane Austen.

Rodney looks up, wide-eyed, down at himself, and then back up at John asking, "What? Did our last trip off-world lead to some kind of disaster I haven't been apprised of yet? Did it actually turn us _into girls_?"

John shrugs his right shoulder and says loudly enough so that Rodney is sure to hear, "As far as I know, I still have a cock." He smiles.

Rodney flushes a color of red John's only seen about once or twice in his life and ducks his head back into his soup, sputtering a bit until he gets his bearings back. John never thought he'd seen anyone come so close to choking to death on vegetable soup as McKay had in that moment, and he chuckles a bit to himself.

" _Anyway_ ," John continues, "her books are staples of Western literature. We should read at least read one. _Pride and Prejudice_ , maybe."

Rodney opens his mouth to object once again, but the sound of Ronon's voice from two seats down stops him.

"I like Jane Austen," Ronon says.

Both John and Rodney turn to gape, looking like fish suddenly taken out of water.

"She has smart, sharp characters and her worlds are carefully constructed, clearly displaying humanity's weaknesses as well as triumphs -- and all within the sphere of something like a country house. Masterful, really, when you think about it." He nods, then grins wickedly. "And I know for sure _I_ have a dick," he finishes.

When he can find his voice again, Rodney manages, "Well. Well. _Pride and Prejudice_ it is."

John only chokes on his chicken salad in response.

*

They are in John's quarters, both new-found masters over _Pride and Prejudice_. At first, Rodney had gone on about Mr. Darcy for so long that John feared he might actually have a _crush on a fictional character_. Which, frankly, so does John, not that he's going to admit that. John had also learned later that calling Rodney "Mr. Collins," even in a joking manner, was enough to get Rodney to shut up for about ten whole minutes, which though awkward at the time (made less awkward by the pack of Molson they were splitting) was vital information that John tucked away for future use.

Now they are sprawled on the floor in front of Rodney's laptop watching the BBC miniseries adaptation that Weir had lent them.

"You know, I bet Mrs. Bennet was quite a handsome woman when she was younger," Rodney says from where he's rolled onto the floor, belly down and chin in his hands.

"Handsome?"

Rodney lifts his chin so he can raise a hand. He gestures in a circular motion. "Pretty, beautiful, handsome," he says, as if that explains anything.

"Oh." John nods before letting his head prop up on the end of his bed again. "So, McKay," he starts.

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you a question?"

Rodney goes strangely still, his eyes flicking away from the computer screen for a minute. "Yes."

"Why all the literary interest? I've been meaning to ask." Maybe that extra beer during Rodney's Collins snit hadn't been such a good idea.

"Well, it's not often that someone shows as keen an interest in fine literature as you did. Sometimes I like exercising my quite large intellect on something other than physics."

"Huh. Because it seems to me that literature would -- "

Rodney turns to look at John, resting his head in his palm. "Would what?"

John shrugs. "Well. I would think it would be on a list of things you find most irritating. Like people with one name and small dogs dressed in clothes."

Rodney huffs. "Why would a dog need a sweater?"

"It's not -- quantifiable," John says.

Rodney's eyes suddenly seem fixed to the floor. "I don't always need things to be quantifiable," he says softly.

"Oh." John considers this piece of news.

"What about you? You're not exactly the poster boy for classic literature," Rodney asks, going on the offensive.

John shrugs. "My mom." He licks his lips. "My mom. She always read to us before bed. Kept the habit, I guess. Usually read before I go to sleep. Had lots of time to read lots of things."

"Huh." Rodney drums his fingers on the carpet. "Does it really matter?"

"Matters to me," John says simply.

Rodney's face looks as for a minute like John waved a particularly revolting newly found Pegasus vegetable under his nose. "So months and months of exchanging books and novels and talking and _now_ you're asking?"

John shrugs. "I get shy sometimes."

Rodney's eye roll is almost audible. "Right."

" _Right_ ," John says, moving his hand to rest gently on Rodney's back. His skin is warm even through his t-shirt, and John rubs his thumb back and forth just once over Rodney's spine.

Rodney lets his forehead hit the floor, hard enough to make a sound but softly enough so that he doesn't hurt himself. "Figures," he says, and John's hand tenses.

Rodney must feel John's tension because next comes, "No, no, no, no. No. Wait." He turns his head to look at John again. He sighs and then stammers, as if a huge secret is being pulled out of his gut. "I. I think." He gulps audibly. "I think the reading thing is hot, okay?"

John blinks. "Well, _yeah_ , Rodney," he says.

"You know, when you do it," Rodney clarifies.

"Yes, McKay," John says, moving his thumb once, twice more.

"I read _Hemingway_ for you," Rodney sputters.

"Dante," John counters.

Rodney sits up suddenly, dislodging John's hand from his back, but scoots closer to John instead. John can't help it, heaves a soft sigh in anticipation.

"So, Sheppard. I've been meaning to ask a question, too," Rodney says, leaning in ever so slightly, close enough to tease but far enough away to frustrate.

"Yeah?"

"In Harry Potter. Black and Lupin --"

"So totally doing it," John says.

Rodney laughs as John leans in. "Thank God, I thought it was just me," he says, allowing John to cup his jaw and close the gap between them while Elizabeth and Darcy bicker in the background.


End file.
